Daniel Ellsberg, whistle-blower and former presidential adviser on nuclear strategy is arrested on Monday, June 22, 1982 at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. Demonstrators opposed to Nuclear weapons development at Lawrence Livermore Lab were hauled off to jail as well as Ellsberg. (photo: AP)
Daniel Ellsberg: US Military-Industrial Complex Also Includes Big Corporations and Congress
28 December 15
“[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and the multinational corporations that they invest in,” noted the whistleblower who leaked “The Pentagon Papers.”
n the second chapter of his extended conversation with Arn Menconi, Daniel Ellsberg describes how, after his trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers, he began to realize that the Vietnam War was not an “aberration” but a representation of standard U.S. foreign policy.
“The big difference was the Vietnamese resisted us,” Ellsberg explained. He says learned more about the nature of the U.S. military-industrial complex as he dug deeper into the origins of the conflict.
On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a famous farewell address which popularized the term “military-industrial complex,” but Ellsberg says the outgoing president had originally intended to refer to the “military-industrial-congressional complex,” only to drop the reference to Congress at the last minute. The whistleblower explains that allies of the military and nuclear scientists in Congress blocked Eisenhower’s efforts to create a nuclear test ban treaty with Russia, inspiring Eisenhower’s speech, which warned the American public to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Yet Ellsberg also warns that it is possible to overstate the importance of the U.S. military, because the military, Congress, and the various U.S. national security agencies all serve interests outside a sitting administration.
“[The] CIA particularly represents the views of the Wall Street investment firms and the multinational corporations that they invest in, and the law firms that represent those companies,” he said.
The United States claims to support democracy throughout the world, but, Ellsberg said: “That is false. That is a cover story.”
Instead, he explained that the U.S. supports whatever leaders will support the country’s covert foreign policy. In addition to carrying out assassinations and interfering in those countries’ elections, the U.S. forms “close relationships with their military which we achieve through a combination of training them … promoting the people we like, direct bribery, arms sales, arms grants — giving them toys in other words — and helping them against dissidents.”
If anyone comes to power that opposes U.S. interests, American forces can overthrow them, Ellsberg argues. Washington’s relationships with other nations are not democratic, he says, but imperial, as much as they were in the time of Sargon, the world’s first emperor, who Ellsberg introduced in Chapter 1 of this series. As a result, U.S. foreign policy has supported torturers and war crimes for over a century.
Key policies the U.S. supports on behalf of Wall Street include “holding down the wages and selling the local resources at very low value,” according to Ellsberg, who added that the governments which support these policies “could not stay in power in democratic elections, so we are against democracy in those countries.”
Even in places where the U.S. supports democracy, he says, such as Europe, Washington cooperates with the elite in those countries to discourage candidates that support real change. America’s leaders in the military-industrial complex believe “[w]e run [foreign countries] better than they would run themselves.”
But Washington is increasingly unable to run itself, Ellsberg notes, citing the nation’s rapidly failing infrastructure.
“Can we fix those things while maintaining the military investments …? Even we can’t do that,” he concluded.
Listen to Chapter 2 | Looking beyond Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex:
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